News & Events

(Los Angeles) Edward Cella is pleased to announce a special exhibition of the photographs of Pedro E. Guerrero.  Presented in conjunction with the national television debut of documentary American Masters: Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey on PBS, the exhibition will present a focused selection of the photography’s most iconic images. Born in 1917 in Casa Grande, Arizona, Guerrero attended Art Center School in Los Angeles and shortly thereafter became one of the principal photographers for Frank Lloyd Wright.  Over his seven-decade-long career, Guerrero photographed buildings by many of America’s most important modern architects, including, Marcel Breuer, Philip Johnson, Edward Durell Stone, and Eero Saarinen.  Guerrero’s photographs have appeared in countless American and foreign magazines including the New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Architectural Record and House and Garden.  He has also contributed photographs to dozens of books on Wright in addition to publications on Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. Guerrero’s photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the United States and Europe, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.  Guerrero died at the age of ninety-five in 2012. The documentary, American Masters: Pedro E. Guerrero: A Photographer’s Journey premieres on Friday, September 18, 9-10 p.m. ET on PBS (check local listings) Discover the remarkable life and work of Pedro E. Guerrero, a Mexican American born and raised in segregated Mesa, Arizona, who had an extraordinary, international photography career. Using Guerrero’s words and images, the program explores his collaborations with three of the most iconic American artists of the 20th century: Frank Lloyd Wright and sculptors Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. This film is a special co-presentation with VOCES.

Discover the remarkable life and work of Pedro E. Guerrero (September 5, 1917-September 13, 2012), a Mexican American, born and raised in segregated Mesa, Arizona, who had an extraordinary international photography career. Using an exclusive interview with Guerrero along with his stunning images, the program explores his collaborations with three of the most iconic American artists of the 20^th century: architect Frank Lloyd Wright and sculptors Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson. Using his outsider’s eye to produce insightful portraits of important modernist architecture, Guerrero became one of the most sought-after photographers of the “Mad Men” era, yet his poignant story is largely unknown. This film is a special co-presentation of VOCES and American Masters.  

New Documentary – American Masters – PBS to air September 2015 A new documentary on Pedro E. Guerrero will air on PBS on the American Masters series this fall. Produced by Paradigm Productions in Berkeley, California, with major funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and Latino Public Broadcasting, this documentary will bring Guerrero's remarkable story to a national audience. Based on 15 hours of interviews with Guerrero in 2010, as well as archival footage, and selections from Guerrero's comprehensive archive, it charts the unlikely career of a young man who left behind his small-town Arizona beginnings, overcame discrimination and found acclaim in the creative mecca of post-World War II New York City. At once unique, universal and truly American, Pedro Guerrero's story will inspire a new generation of artists to undertake their own journeys of discovery. Air Date: September 18, 2015 Link to: www.GuerreroMovie.com

What does it take for a 22-year-old art school drop-out to start a lifelong professional relationship with “the greatest American architect of all time”? Originally published by Curbed as “How a 22-Year-Old Became Wright’s Trusted Photographer,” this article reveals that for Pedro E. Guerrero, it took some guts and a lot of luck – but once they were working together this unlikely pairing was a perfect match. When Frank Lloyd Wright hired Pedro E. Guerrero to photograph Taliesin West in 1939, neither knew it would lead to one of the most important relationships in architectural history. Wright was 72 and had already been on the cover of Time for Fallingwater. Guerrero was a 22-year-old art school drop-out. Their first meeting was prompted by Guerrero’s father, a sign painter who vaguely knew Wright from the neighborhood and hoped the architect would offer his son a job. Any job. Read full article HERE.

Photographer who after striking up an unlikely rapport with Frank Lloyd Wright went on to portray the great Modernist architect at work Pedro Guerrero was for 20 years the trusted photographer for America’s best-known architect Frank Lloyd Wright until FLW’s death in 1959. Read full article HERE.

Pedro E. Guerrero, a former art school dropout who showed up in the dusty Arizona driveway of Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939, boldly declared himself a photographer and then spent the next half-century working closely with him, capturing his modernist architecture on film, died on Thursday at his home in Florence, Ariz. He was 95. Read full article HERE.

This is a video documenting a talk between architectural photographer Pedro E. Guerrero and art critic Hunter Drohojowska-Philp at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions on April 5, 2012. Pedro Guerrero was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award.The talk accompanied the Julius Shulman Institute’s exhibition Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life at Woodbury University’s Hollywood Gallery. Videography and Editing by Jeremy Blair at Blair Bones Media. View Video HERE:

I wrote the following essay a few years ago for a limited edition book of photographs by Pedro E. Guerrero, put out by Cattletrack Press in Scottsdale. The publication was designed to celebrate not only Guerrero’s scintillating talent, but also his improbable success as the son of a sign painter from Mesa, whose grandparents were Mexican immigrants. Born in Casa Grande in 1917, Guerrero still remembers the humiliating notices prohibiting Mexicans from using public swimming pools in his neighborhood. Read full article HERE.

In 1939, in the dry, desert foothills of the McDowell Mountain Range of Scottsdale, Ariz., a young man asked an older man for a job. The young man, a 22-year-old named Pedro E. Guerrero, was trying to start a career as a photographer. The older man, at 72, was Frank Lloyd Wright. At the time, Guerrero lacked a degree in photography and was unaware of Wright's celebrity-architect status—he only knew that Wright was a man building a house in the desert (the house, of course, was Taliesin West). "I had no idea who this man was," he says. "If I had known, I probably wouldn’t have gone." It was perhaps this innocence that appealed to Wright and led to Guerrero's career as the architect's preferred photographer. Read full article HERE.